Morrison Heights Baptist Church is theologically conventional and traditionally oriented. But their otherwise conventional worship style, complete with an instrumental mixture of traditional orchestra and modern band, has a state-of-the-art technical foundation. Even more so, after the integration of an array of technology platforms from Digico, Klang, and Fourier Audio.
Installed by Franklin, Tennessee-based Integrated Production Solutions (IPS), the church now has a pair of Digico Quantum338 consoles at front of house and broadcast; Fourier Audio transform.engine plugin interfaces, integrating and enabling the use of any VST3 plugin within the audio workflow; and a Klang:konductor paired with 16 Klang:kontrollers to provide a new immersive in-ear monitoring experience onstage for its worship team vocalists and musicians. In addition, the Digico consoles are each fitted with the new Pulse upgrade, which takes their capacity from 128 channels to 156 and from 64 aux/sub groups to 72.
Wade Russell, IPS Executive Director of Integration, says he and Morrison Heights Baptist’s Director of Media and Technical Ministries, Eric Busby, have been working together for over a decade, helping the church walk the critical line between being at the leading edge of audio technology without going into the “bleeding-edge” zone, which brings with it a higher level of training and operational intensity.
“It’s one of those situations where you want to be on the cutting edge, where the customer is one of the first ones who has a new technology, and but not where they have to say, ‘Great! I hope it works,’” quips Russell. “That’s why this combination of systems was such a good fit for Morrison Heights – the technology is right at the edge and can do a lot, but it’s all centered around the Digico consoles, which bring a high level of recognition and trust. You’re at the leading edge, but you also know it’s all going to work well together.”
Russell adds that the Pulse upgrade was timely, allowing the consoles to better accommodate the more-elaborate event productions the church does at Christmas, Easter, and other times. The transition from an older IEM monitoring platform to Klang matched that, allowing virtually everyone onstage to have complete control over their personal monitoring environment, delivering 16 immersive mixes and processing up to 128 input signals at up to 96kHz with an internal processing latency of less than 0.25ms. “The Klang:kontrollers fit their needs perfectly,” he says. “Eric was like, ‘I have all these hands-on mixers that my people have been used to and I can’t imagine going away from something that’s a tactile mixer to just an iPad. I need the physical knobs and controls.’ So I pointed the Klang:kontroller out to him and it fit the bill perfectly.”
In addition to audio, Busby has a significant background in IT, and he says the combination of the three brands into a single solution resonated for him in that manner. “First, we’re getting proven technology that’s at the leading edge of where the industry is,” he says. “Then, it’s all consolidated into a single integrated solution that makes it easier for me to manage. As an IT person, that means a lot to me. When you have several different platforms from different manufacturers, it’s not unusual in tech for one to blame the others when things won’t work together like you want them to. With Digico, Klang, and Fourier Audio, I get all the support I need from a single source. It makes everything so much smoother.”
He also notes that the Klang:kontrollers have made things smoother onstage for the musicians as well. “Having a hardware interface, the ability to simply reach for a knob instead of an iPad screen when you’re trying to play and work other aspects of your rig makes it so much easier,” he says.
Busby has been a longtime Waves user; however, moving to Fourier Audio has been a rewarding paradigm shift for him, allowing seamless integration of his plugins into the consoles via the transform.engine. “We have two transform engines: one driving in-room FOH plugins and another for broadcast plugin needs,” he says. “This gives us a lot more customizability between our broadcast world and FOH.” Russell confirms that Fourier was the right choice, adding: “Eric texted me a couple of months ago and said, ‘Tell all your clients that if they’re considering anything else, they don’t know what they’re missing!’”
As well as all of this new technology fit together, it was still a lot of “new” to arrive all at once. Anticipating that, IPS assembled the entire ecosystem in its Franklin facility, giving Busby the opportunity to familiarize himself with each component and the system as a whole, off-line and without the pressures of having to first encounter it in the church.
“We’re a design-build integration company – we shop-build and test all of our systems in-house to make sure everything’s perfect before we deploy it,” he says. “It saves a lot of time on site and just makes sure that we have all the components needed and everything’s operating by doing our own QC. As part of that, I reached out to Eric and had him come up to our facility and load a session that he’d built and start getting familiar with it, running some tracks through a small PA in our shop and being hands-on with it. That way, he was not having to learn the console the week we installed it. We also brought in Digico National Sales Manager Ryan Shelton, who lives nearby in Nashville, who came up and answered any questions Eric had. It’s really valuable to have that level of manufacturer support, as well as be able to learn the systems and how they work – and work together – in an environment completely free of pressure.”
For more info on Morrison Heights Baptist Church, visit www.morrisonheights.org. IPS can be found online at www.ips.live.
